Microsoft: Gmail rival Outlook.com will 'look good on your iPad' Microsoft has launched a successor to its venerable Hotmail web-based email service, in hopes that a revamped UI, integration with social networks, and tighter ties to the software giant's cloudy online services will woo users away from rivals, in particular Gmail. "We think the time is right to reimagine email," Microsoft's …
And will they tighten security so that I don't keep getting emails from people I know with hotmail accounts telling me that they're on holiday/at a conference at short notice in (insert exotic place here) and have been mugged/left their briefcase and papers in a taxi and need $1000 to pay their hotel bill.
What happens when you get a phone call from 'someone you know' at 'some exotic place' asking for your $1000? Or, say, get IMs in your iPhone, Blackberry, Android device, or whatever?
Next you'll want MS to block all e-mail referring to Western Union. Because, like, anything asking you to send money through Western Union is automatically a scam, just like anything related to MS is automatically insecure.
I'd hate to be a shareholder in Western Union these days. Or Microsoft.
Talk about missing the point. He doesn't want the emails blocked, he wants security improved so they don't get sent in the first place. Either all Hotmail users are idiots who use "Password" as their password, or there's a security issue in there somewhere as Hotmail accounts do seem to get compromised at an alarming rate.
It could be as simple as a shit selection of reset questions, but there must be some common factor for so many of the buggers to get their accounts pwned. I've moved people from Hotmail to other accounts and they've had no further issues, though that could also relate to my asking whether they were using secure passwords.
I'm not so sure. I don't know why I would want any kind of integration between my email and social "media" . They're just different things. Email's boring and simple and I like it that way. I don't want to "like" an email or "tweet"...well, an email.
Couldn't just be a case of Microsoft jumping on a bandwagon for lack of any better ideas, could it?
Uhm...
They've done a "decent" job is more like it IMO. I mean; how come that 3rd party social media apps. are way more popular than the native support? Because those provide much better access.
Don't get me wrong; I tend to agree with you. But I'd be more impressed if MS would have fixed the option which allows us WP7 users to sync todo lists with Outlook 2010 and WP7 /first/ (the Outlook Hotmail connecter still can't cope with this).
"Half the screen space in Gmail is wasted...People just learn to tune it out."
Some people select the Compact setting and have more info than you can shake a stick at. I can get 23 emails in the main panel and 24 folders etc on the left. The Reply button only appears when I'm reading an email too.
I'm running with 'cosy' and around 10% of screen is empty. There's not much difference between all 3 display densities anyway, most visibly just more vertical spacing in text.
Unfortunately Gmail achieves that information density by using cryptic icons and dropdown selectors that frequently leave me wondering how to do even simple things. MS seem to have done better with clearer controls, at the cost of pissing away much more screen space. It just isn't empty screen space letting them tell porkies about use of space!
TBH neither of them are more than crippled ways to handle email, a single screen/window interface is too limiting.
Indeed, and so I went to try this Outlook.com and what did I experience....even greater acres of wasted screen space! It^s terrible. The whole Win 7 / Outlook 2010 / Windows Live experience is of wasted space. I much prefer WLM/Hotmail as a solution compared to Gmal (sic), but going for all things touchy and feely and girly is driving me nuts. I want to keep my desktop and mouse interface, not poke my finger (or d1ck ?) at everything like a 3 year old loving his/her fisher-price environment. Grow up MS and cut the cr@p.
I use gmail with adblock in chrome and find with no ads etc it looks much better than this.
Why do they thing I want to wait for previews of documents etc to load every time I open an email ?
I only load pictures etc if I am interested.
Looks like a mishmash or ideas from half a dozen user groups and picking the average idea from each to produce something that makes me go Meh.....
I don't know what the proportion of users around the world are that don't install ad-blockers but I would bet it's not that high actually. Similarly, I would bet that most people are different to you in that they just want to see pictures that come with an email rather than manually open them individually. You call it a mishmash of ideas from half a dozen user groups, but would you say that you are a typical person when it comes to IT? If not, then possibly they are right to build it around the responses from user groups rather than what Big_Ted wants... Whilst your post may be completely right for you, is it right for most email users is the point I'm making.
I generally use gmail via a Eudora client & imap, but when I'm out and about & use a browser, the ads are fairly unobtrusive, and as I've usually just emptied the spam directory, tend to be "Spam Strudle" shite. I've never resorted to ad-block (or its ilk) when using gmail, as I feel that as it's free & paid for by advertising it would be churlish to use it whilst running an "ad-block" plugin.
Actually anyone that "proudly" states they use gmail _with_ adblock are pretty stupid IMHO. Nuff said.
When I saw the headline of those article on the main page I feared the worst..... NOOOoooooooo dont metro-ify hotmail. I immediately thought there would be huge icons for each message, everything would be impossible to find, half the features would be removed and we'd all probably be forced to change our email addresses whether we wanted to or not etc etc etc......
However, from what I've seen so far, it doesnt look that metro-like, and so it looks ok.
"when the user isn't reading a message, the "Reply" menu disappears completely."
So you can't reply to a message unless it is open? (If, say, you read it, closed it, and came back later to reply). You have to open it again - extra clicks or taps or whatever?
Why are they so keen on dictating how you will use the service, removing alternative ways to do things?
Frank has posted advice/opinion and been voted down, but there is no explanation as to why. That's not very helpful.
Is the service not good? Is is not reliable? Is it not good value for money? Did it supplant what might have been a better service? What, FFS? Merely downvoting Frank has left me completely in the dark.
You can be downvoted just for saying you like a Microsoft product here.
I use Office 365. It is good. The online versions of the programs are better than Google's online office tools (imo), though not as feature complete as the Desktop versions. You can link it to the Desktop version of Office however and it has proper versioning of documents and sharing permissions, etc. and is pretty easy to set up and manage. But there's going to be a pretty massive overhaul and upgrade very soon when Office 2013 comes out. You can buy the particular services that you need - e.g. if you want Sharepoint or not.
Best thing to do rather than take someone's word for it (the above is just my opinion), is to try it out. You can get a free month long preview of both the new Office 365 and the new Office 2013. You should probably try them together as that's how they're planned to work.
They don't interfere with existing Office installs.
"Or for suggesting that $3/month is a good deal when gmail does it for free?"
They said three quid, not dollars, USAian. And yes, ad-free with IMAP support is well worth a few quid a month to some people. Others balk at three pounds a month for it because it's not worth it. But it's nice to be able to use your own local client, or easily use digital signatures (which we all should be doing) or have it come from your own domain name (which you can do with the paid version).
Not everyone wants the same thing and to a lot of people, £3 a month is well worth anything that makes things more convenient. And many of us prefer to pay for something with cash rather than with privacy too. It's all personal choice, but as predicted, downvotes have come just for saying what I like and for suggesting someone get a free trial and make their own minds up... Someone asked a genuine question and I answered it. My point about how you can be downvoted here for liking a Microsoft product has been amply demonstrated too.
I was thinking something similar, I would want it to look super nice on my Surface tablet. But more importantly, I have been @hotmail for 15 years now and am more than happy with it, I will admit I pay £15 a year or something so its ad free and syncs with the Windows Live mail program.
I have visited outlook.com it looked okay, filled the wole screen, no ads down the right, again probably because I am paying for it, but now whenever I go to my hotmail account it now shows as the outlook.com page, although the address is still live.com.
Haven't they tried relaunching before with hotmail.co.uk? live.com and live.co.uk? Okay so they have a lot of different mail servers, but please leave my hotmail account alone, I had it before you came along and bought it all up!
Okay, I've moaned, I just don't like change.
oh, and I don't use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social media stuff, so please, can I just switch it all off and not be reminded about it ever, please? And yes Amazon you listen to that as well, I'm not bothered about telling everyone I just bought 50 shades of grey...oh...oops.
@Roger B: You can sync contacts et al with the Windows Live Mail desktop program without paying, and you get no ads in the desktop client. I've used it before with my Gmail account, and my contacts will still sync with my Windows Live ID/.NET Passport/whatever they're calling it now. Unfortunately, there's no synchronization between it and Gmail, but that's to be expected. That said, you can import from a CSV.
I use Hotmail and such quite a lot, just like I use Outlook 2010, so you'd assume I should like this.
Well, I think the whole setup is a very crude hack which is also quite annoying to work with.
I gave the new Outlook a try and well.. So far, so good. I have my folders, I have my quickviews. Not too nasty. And then I tried to access my SkyDrive which is also important to me. The switch screen looks awfull; a big black bar (1/5th of the screen at least) appears with 4 huge icons in it. Why couldn't those icons sit in my titlebar?
So I click SkyDrve and what do you know... All of a sudden you're taken back into the /old/ Hotmail interface and your SkyDrive folders appear.
That's not a new implementation of e-mail, that's a very crude and incomplete /hack/. IMO a stupid one at that.
I switched back right back to Hotmail. After all; I'll be moving back anyway whenever I access my SkyDrive or Calendar. They also "forgot" to port the online Messenger.
Sorry for 2 posts after one other, but look at what I got after switching back:
After moving back to Hotmail I was asked (pleaded?) to send feedback. Ok, we'll do that...
Pick a product:
"Calendar, Groups, Hotmail, Live@Edu, Messenger, Profile, SkyDrive" and the rest is all "Windows Live *". (Windows Live Account, Windows Live Events, etc.). I figured "Windows Live Mail" but all the welcome messages and welcome email calls the new interface "Outlook". ("Welcome to Outlook", "Get an Outlook email address", "Tell us what you think of Outlook").
So why can't I comment on a product called "Outlook" ?
Talk about a hack....
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xgjrw/we_are_the_team_behind_the_new_outlookcom_service/
It's a bit gushy, but there are some decent answers to questions.
Me? I'll stick with a domain and a proper e-mail client.
Click new message...
1/3 of the left hand side of the screen is taken for the To: address. Great way to save space!
Your subject goes on the top, above the format tool bar.
Your message below.
Delete welcome message, and what appears in the empty inbox?
" Wow, you've got a very clean inbox! (Did you know you can receive messages from other email accounts?)"
Wow, that's very clever Microsoft, now piss off.
"According to Hall, some 17 per cent of the email messages a typical user receives today are updates from social networks."
That's odd. I get around a hundred legitimate emails each week, none of which are from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al, and well over a thousand that are spam. I'd rather they sorted out the spam problem before doing design updates.
Must be some nth dimensional warped reality where "Outlook" equates to a positive, uplifting rebrand designed to make more ad fodder users flock to the fold. Then again, it's Hotmail, favoured communications tool of Mrs Miriam Abacha, wife of the late Sani Abacha, so perhaps anything is 'up' from there.
Seems the ABMers and fanbois are out in force.
Sorry folks MS introduce a new thing, immediately the ABM/Linux/Fanbois have to post "well it's crap" posts regardless of what it is, it comes from Microsh1t type comments.
I tried it and it seemed like my outlook in a web page maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there is an advantage in moving to outlook.com but can't yet see it, I've had a hotmail account for donkeys years and don't suffer a spam problem, maybe one a week, perhaps not using your email account for sex sites has an advantage.
"...and it seemed like my outlook in a web page..."
For some of us, that's the whole problem in a nutshell. No need to be a zealot or sex fiend of any hue; prior exposure to Outlook will do nicely as a basis for "not for me, ever", although a billion desperate Microsoft re-launches certainly helps.
You might try assuming people think for themselves when they comment, rather than being stereotypes who always reflect marketing hype as opinion. It's less embarrassing.
You've hit the nail on the head. The rebrand (sorry: 'reimagine') is the big problem here, not the new interface.
Unless you're a plumber, people use webmail services to keep home and work lives separate. Ever seen someone checking a BlackBerry, and then their smartphone?
Forcing private users onto the brand name of probably the most hated/unstable corporate applications (which let's face it, virtually every major company is forced to use, thanks to Exchange's dominance) is a dead duck.
Face it : who _enjoys_ using Outlook? We dread it!
Almost as daft an idea as when PricewaterhouseCoopers blew $110m on rebranding their consulting arm as "Monday" - clearly the most hated day of the week - only to scrap the name a few days later.
I bet those at the Mountain View Chocolate Factory are pissing themselves laughing!
You're having a fucking laff aren't you?
I use Outlook and I enjoy using it - as do millions of other people around the world. I enjoy it becasue I don't notice it - it just works and it gets the job done in an efficient and reliable manner.
The people at Mountain View can be pissing in each other's mouths for all I care; this is an excellent update and one I can't wait to use full time.
"Unless you're a plumber, people use webmail services to keep home and work lives separate"
Normal people use their home PC for home email and their work PC for work email... Outlook is/was (not sure they even provide it for free now) very widely used with the masses who would struggle to find a webmail. The number of people using the email address provided by their ISP is evidence of this.
I have just tried it and I have to say that I like the interface a *lot* more than gmail which I use as my main email account. I agree with a previous poster though who says the switch between outlook and calendar or skydrive is clunky in the extreme. Still, I'm sure they will address those issues eventually.
Turned on my PC and reloaded my browsing session. Where the Outlook.com tab had been, there was now a Hotmail login page. So I entered my new Outlook address and password, signed in and saw Live.com flash up before I finished up back in Outlook again.
It looks like the bastard son of Hotmail and Gmail to me. But it was nice to get in early and snap up some decent addresses before they all went.
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